Goat Funeral: Poems

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Sheep Meadow Press, 2006 - Greek poetry - 61 pages
"When Virginia Woolf went to Greece in 1906, she felt that 'all lumps in the earth here are but so much dust heaped negligently over some well-ordered temple or statue beneath.' Identical treasure is inherent in the heroic soil for Christopher Bakken; this poet is nurtured by lithic yield: 'Here I believe in stone, existence in the flesh . . .' And with all the power of a burial that is yet a parturition, his book reads as a kind of tephromancy, a divination by ashes: 'Since the earth is god I am not dust but god.' It is not 'questions of travel,' or even the effects of an affinity these luminous poems afford, but a lasting procession. There is no 'after Greece,' nothing subsequent: the dust and what is beneath it are present forever in the poet's mouth." --Richard Howard

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Contents

Theme Song for an Agrarian Epic 35
3
Eclogue
9
Eclogue 6
16
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

CHRISTOPHER BAKKEN's first book, After Greece, won the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 2001. Bakken is also co-translator of The Lions' Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). He received an M.F.A. from the Writing Seminars of Columbia University and a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at University of Houston.

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